THE BLACK CURTAIN

Woolrich’s second noir novel, originally published in 1941, presents an amnesiac with the greatest mystery of all: his own troubled past.

After he’s struck by a piece of molding falling from a building, Frank Townsend awakens to find no serious physical damage. The damage, he learns, when he goes to his apartment building to find his wife long gone and the janitor’s wife agog at his return, is to his memory, which has blacked out the last three-plus years of his life. Frank’s reunion with his wife, Virginia, brings him a deep sense of relief, but nagging questions still remain. As Frank asks himself, “Why do I run away, when I don’t know what I am running away from?” What was he doing during the years he can’t remember? Why is a strange man dogging his footsteps? And will he ever be truly safe again? Spiriting Virginia away from her new home and urging her to take refuge with her mother, Frank follows every slender lead that points to his earlier life and finds that as handyman Daniel Nearing, he’d been wanted for the murder of his employer, Harry S. Diedrich—a shooting witnessed by the victim’s wife, Alma; his younger brother, William; and Arthur Struthers, a neighbor. Aided by Ruth Dillon, the housemaid who’d fallen in love with Dan Nearing, Frank struggles to find exculpatory evidence and predictably ends up in even deeper trouble. Throughout it all, noir pioneer Woolrich consistently subordinates his characters and events to a stifling sense of nightmare whose dispelling by the revelation of the truth about Harry’s murder comes as a distinct anticlimax.

A routine mystery drenched in an unremittingly dark atmosphere.